At the start of a lecture concerning the role of God in our mental health, I begin by asking the students two questions. These are psychology majors. The first question: “Raise your hand if you think mature Christians can struggle with mental health issues.” Pretty much all the hands go up. The second question: “How many of you believe God can help us with our mental health struggles?” All the hands go up.
I ask those questions to illustrate how, when it comes to mental health, we live between two extremes. One extreme is the prosperity gospel optimism, the belief that faith confers immunity to mental health problems. My students admit that people of faith are vulnerable to mental struggles.
The other extreme is that mental health struggles have nothing to do with faith, that God provides no aid, and all you need to do is go to therapy and take your medicine. My students, I believe rightly, reject this view and believe that God comes to our assistance when we are facing mental health challenges.
We live, in short, in a messy middle ground. God helps us, but prayer does not make our depression magically go away. Consequently, specifying the exact nature of God’s help can be difficult. My sense is that people approach the question depending upon where they fall along the enchantment versus disenchantment continuum. Enchanted Christians, who have a more robust vision of God’s presence and power in the world, tilt more toward prosperity gospel optimism. Disenchanted Christians tend to prize medicine and psychotherapy as the primary, and perhaps sole, means to face mental illness. You don’t need God; you need a doctor.
You may need both. And really, mental health is just one example among many where we try to suss out how divine and human action mix and mingle.
Psalm 124 starts with a recognition, a repeated one, that things would have been bad if the Lord had not been on our side. But the Lord was on our side, and we have escaped, like a bird loosed from the hunter’s net. Here’s the entire psalm, one of my favorites:
If it had not been the Lord who was on our side,
let Israel now say—
if it had not been the Lord who was on our side,
when men rose up against us,
then they would have swallowed us up alive,
when their anger was kindled against us;
then the flood would have swept us away,
the torrent would have gone over us;
then over us would have gone
the raging waters.Blessed be the Lord,
who has not given us
as prey to their teeth!
We have escaped as a bird
from the snare of the fowlers;
the snare is broken,
and we have escaped!Our help is in the name of the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.
I will admit that I don’t know how exactly God helps us. But I am absolutely convinced that God does help us, powerfully so. When it comes to mental health, it’s not just therapy and medicine. There is a power at work in our lives that sets us free from the hunter’s snare. And I believe this because of the answers I’ve heard sitting in the circles of a recovery meetings and walking alongside the incarcerated. “If the Lord had not been on your side,” I’ve asked, “where would you be today?”
“Dead” is the most common answer. But every answer shares the same testimony: we would have been lost, utterly, totally lost. The flood would have swept us away. We would have drowned in the raging waters. That dark power that was hunting us would have captured and killed us.
If the Lord had not been on our side, that would have been our fate. But we have been pulled from the waters. The snare was broken, and we have escaped.
Blessed be the Lord.
